Product wrap-up from SuperComputing 2005

Posted on November 16, 2005

—We wrap up our coverage of this week's SuperComputing 2005 conference in Seattle, which had about 9,000 attendees, with a number of announcements related to InfiniBand and storage for high-performance computing (HPC) environments.

The highest-profile storage event at the show was StorCloud, a consortium of vendors that built a virtual on-site "storage on request" capability to support researchers and demonstrate high-bandwidth applications at the conference.

Intransa demonstrated its 10GBps Ethernet-based IP SAN powering an HPC visualization application hosted by Sandia National Laboratories in the StorCloud exhibit. Intransa will also participate in the StorCloud Challenge in conjunction with Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST). Both demonstrations will use Intransa's IP5500 iSCSI storage systems. At SuperComputing 2005, the IP5500 was accessed via 10Gbps N210 server adapters from Chelsio.

In another SuperComputing 2005 announcement, Panasas introduced the next generation of its ActiveScale Storage Cluster to address performance, management, deployment, and integration demands of commercial customers. Panasas is now shipping 800GB StorageBlades to deliver 8TB of capacity per 4U shelf and up to 80TB per cabinet. The company also introduced three-, five-, and 10-shelf rack systems that ship in a 42U cabinet. Panasas' new I/O Router provides integration with clusters built on either InfiniBand or Myrinet networks.

Broadcom was also at the SuperComputing conference demonstrating its RAIDCore PCI Express (PCIe) Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and Serial ATA (SATA) RAID controller cards in an HBA format. Broadcom's demonstration included a SAS RAID controller with an integrated PCIe host bus architecture. The implementation of the PCIe host bus enables 2GBps full-duplex bandwidth between the processor and the storage system to address the needs of HPC applications. In addition, the demo featured Broadcom's SAS technology with high-capacity SATA II drives.

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